Tomato jelly with mint and basil coulis
Chilled sweetcorn and crab chowder
Crab salad, champagne jelly
Tofu with roast pumpkin puree
Spanish omelette
Roasted eggplant, vichysoisse
Duck pie tee, mango emulsion
Braised pork, red wine jelly
Crepes with shredded pork, salsa verde
Cheese, chocolate orange, espresso jelly
A few weeks ago, left to his own devices as Mrs P was travelling, Porco whiled away an afternoon at the art auction previews. There weren’t many things to buy, not even obscure objects of desire. However, what got this old pig’s attention was the stuff that he did not want to raise his trotters for at auction. Like the Kiko Escora we didn’t buy last year – we picked the other two of three. Or the Masriadi from 2004 – yes, he has gotten better and funnier. The funniest bit of the afternoon was the two very fruity young men drooling over the Hoa self portraits which they “absolutely lurved, ahhh”.
Boys, Porco has news for you – ours is larger.
Why are there so few entrepreneurs in Singapore? Porco was re-reading an old dot.com saga from the last millenium and it struck him that there were really two kinds of characters (from the book) that stood out in Silicon Valley at the height of the last boom – there were the flat-out broke visionaries who arrived with a dream and about $250 but left with millions of dollars and there were the geniuses who were being paid US$80 an hour to write code and build software. The geniuses were working out the minimum number of hours needed to support the lifestyle they aspired to, which was about 18 hours a week and ended up no richer than when they first started.
So this got Porco thinking – who would risk a S$100,000 a year job to pursue a dream? Then perhaps the reason few would risk the dream is that there are too many S$100,000 jobs around.
Porco is not really a musical pig and he takes a lot of stick for his tastes in pop music. That said, he thinks there are combinations between music and lyrics which are clearly mismatched (think Abba, for example – great tunes, crap words). Then there are songs you wished you had written and stuff that are nearly perfect (like some Beatles stuff, some Lightning Seeds and the odd REM, even some Oasis – not forgetting the occasional one hit wonder like Hobostank). And once in a while, you listen to something like Cyndi Lauper’s Time after Time again and you have a rethink about every preconceived notion about pop music you’ve ever had.
